[Lingtyp] incipient ergativity conditioned by number of A

Thu Jun 1 22:14:20 UTC 2023

送信元: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> (Dmitri Sitchinava <mitrius at gmail.com> の代理)
日付: 2023年6月1日 木曜日 19:06
Cc: LINGTYP LINGTYP <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
件名: Re: [Lingtyp] incipient ergativity conditioned by number of A

In Ukraine (both in Ukrainian and in Russian) a popular journalistic construction since 2019 has been U Zelenskoho zajavyly 'At Zelensky's (impersonal) they-said', implying that Zelensky was not quite an independent actor and his spokesmen had a kind of collective institutional agentivity. Later it was extended to u Putina etc., being now a default construction for spokesmen.

Dmitri

Am Do., 1. Juni 2023 um 09:56 Uhr schrieb Silvia Luraghi <luraghi at unipv.it>:

Dear David,

I agree with Chrsitian and Sebastian, this is a way of deindividualizing the agent and rather than with number it is connected with collective/institutional referents. In Italian you find the same, especially in journalistic discourse, e.g. 

Nel PD ci si interroga sulla linea da tenere

in_the PD one REFL asks on_the line to keep

"In the Democratic Party they wonder what line they should adopt"

Interestingly, this is ok with collective nouns that are morphologically singular but with nouns that are morphologically plural you cannot use plural articles, you must treat them as if they were not count plurals:

Nella Lega ci si interroga ... OK

in_the(SG)  Lega(SG) ...

*Nei Fratelli d'Italia ci si interroga... (impossible)

in_the(PL) Fratelli(PL) d'Italia

In Fratelli d'Italia ci si interroga... OK (here the preposition in comes without the article)

Silvia

Silvia Luraghi
Università di Pavia
Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, Sezione di Linguistica 
Strada Nuova 65
I-27100 Pavia
tel.: +39/0382/984685

Web page personale: https://studiumanistici.unipv.it/?pagina=docenti&id=68

Il giorno gio 1 giu 2023 alle ore 09:18 Sebastian Nordhoff <sebastian.nordhoff at glottotopia.de> ha scritto:

Dear David,
in both Sinhala and Sri Lanka Malay, institutional actors (government, 
board, committee, police) are marked with the instrumental. I suppose 
that your Likud examples would get the instrumental as well in those 
languages.

You write that [number] seems to be the relevant factor. But if you have 
"one baker" and "thirteen bakers", you would probably not get the 
difference. So it might be more the feature [+institutional] or 
[+collective], as you say.

When looking into the instrumental in the Sri Lankan languages, I was 
wondering whether British English agreement ("The committee have 
discussed ... ") and Dutch feminine institutional reference ("het 
kabinet en haar beleid" 'the cabinet[N] and her[F] policies') are 
actually triggered by the same semantics. I found that interesting since 
this is a grammatical fact that relies on the society having some kind 
of bureaucracy, which poses interesting questions with regard to innateness.
Best wishes
Sebastian

On 6/1/23 06:43, David Gil wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Is anybody familiar with a case of split ergativity in which the 
> conditioning factor is the number of the Agent NP?
> 
> My reason for asking:in Hebrew, especially in a journalese register, in 
> a transitive A V P construction, when the A is semantically plural, 
> typically denoting a collective entity, it is often marked with the 
> locative proclitic /b-/ while the verb takes plural subject agreement in 
> an apparent impersonal construction.For example, in a sentence about the 
> Likud political party:
> 
> balikud muxanim lidħot et hamahapexa hamišpatit ...
> 
> LOC-Likud prepare:3.PLM INF-postpone ACC DEF-revolution 
> DEF-legislative.F ...
> 
> idiomatically: 'The Likud is willing to postpone the legislative 
> revolution ...'
> 
> literally: 'In the Likud they're willing to postpone the legislative 
> revolution ...'
> 
> Such constructions are extremely widespread in journalistic writing.The 
> above example, part of a newspaper headline, is followed by a string of 
> several clauses all exhibiting the same construction, each beginning 
> with a semantically plural agent marked with locative /b-:/ 'in the 
> ruling party', 'in closed rooms', 'in the other side', etc. 
> [https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/bk5kubsin#autoplay]
> 
> In the above construction, the locative proclitic /b-/ seems to be 
> approaching the function of an ergative marker, albeit a rather atypical 
> one: in particular, when the P is definite, as in the above example, it 
> is marked with the definite direct object, thereby retaining accusative 
> alignment.
> 
> I wonder whether anybody has come across similar constructions, in which 
> an incipient or apparent ergative case marking system is licensed by 
> number (rather than by more commonly-cited features such as aspect or 
> person).
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> David
> 
> 
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